OFF-THE-SHELF MOTION CARD FIRST TO INTEGRATE HIGH PERFORMANCE AMPLIFIERS WITH FULL MOTION CONTROL PACKAGE

PMD releases the Prodigy®/CME Machine Controller Card, integrating up to four amplifiers and a complete positioning motion controller on a single printed circuit card.

Performance Motion Devices, Inc. (PMD) today announces a new family of Prodigy motion cards that combines a full featured four axis motion card with high performance on-card amplifiers. The Prodigy®/CME Machine Controller Card utilizes PMD's ATLAS® Digital Amplifiers to eliminate the need for external amplifiers, allowing new levels of convenience, integration, and cost savings for applications in life sciences equipment, scientific automation, robotics, and general purpose automation.

Machine Controller cards are offered in 1, 2, 3, and 4-axis configurations, and control the torque, velocity, and position of DC Brush, Brushless DC, and Step motors. They measure just 7.8" x 4.88" (19.8 cm x 12.4 cm), providing a small form factor for space constrained designs. Communications to the card include 10/100 MBPS Ethernet with UDP and TCP protocols, serial RS232, serial RS485, and CANbus.

These advanced motion cards are based on PMD's Magellan® Motion Processors, which perform motion command interpretation and numerous other real-time functions. Users can program a variety of motion profiles including S-curve, trapezoidal, velocity contouring, and electronic gearing. Servo loop compensation utilizes a full 32-bit position error, PID with velocity and acceleration feedforward, integration limit and dual biquad filters for sophisticated control of complex loads.

Machine controller cards include a powerful C-Motion Engine module (CME) which allows developers to download and execute their application code directly on the card. Program development is simplified through the use of PMDs C-Motion development suite that includes an extensive library of pr...

Machine controller cards include a powerful C-Motion Engine module (CME) which allows developers to download and execute their application code directly on the card. Program development is simplified through the use of PMDs C-Motion development suite that includes an extensive library of proven motion control code as well as an array of development and debug tools. The powerful C-Motion command set includes an extensive source code library of motion commands that speeds development of C/C++ programs.

These cards provide 32 channels of digital and analog I/O, along with numerous additional features such as non-volatile RAM storage, a 468 KB dual ported RAM for trace and multi-dimensional contouring, up to 2MB of user program space, quadrature and Absolute SSI encoder input formats, and a full complement of motion inputs such as limit switches, index signals, and Hall signal inputs.

Each machine controller card hosts up to four ATLAS Digital Amplifiers, one for each motion control axis. These advanced amplifiers provide up to a kilowatt of drive capacity with an input voltage range of 12-56V, a continuous current rating of 14 Amps, and a peak current rating of 25 Amps. ATLAS amplifiers provide high performance features including field oriented control, short circuit protection, overtemperature sense, I2t current monitoring, selectable PWM rate, and ultra-precise current trace.

The new Prodigy®/CME Machine Controller Cards are available in OEM quantities starting at $695.